How the numbers are displayed ,in the calculator display,
or in the computer screen?
What is exactly,happening,when I type the number 532 on the calculator?
I mean,what is hapening,in the circuits,
and in the display of the calculator?
Can you describe it,in detail please?
Do the numbers in the computer screen ,are displayed in the same method?
If not,please tell me how exactly it is displayed?
How does the calculator and the computer,
do the calculation of:532+439?
and how do they send it to the screen?
IF you can please answer ,in detail ,as much as possible.
Please answer the question,in the point of view of the electronics (electrical circuits),HARDWARE,
and not from the point of view of software.
please send your answer ,to my e-mail:

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Fri Nov 07, 2003 4:30 am

TitaniumRegular poster

Joined: 04 Aug 2003Posts: 27

It sounds like you are scrounging around for help in a homework assignment

My advice is read a book, after all how can you be sure the postings on a forum are accurate....

Fri Nov 21, 2003 1:20 pm

YodaRegular poster

Joined: 03 Dec 2003Posts: 20Location: The swamps of Dagobah

Its all to do with 0's and 1's.... Its really boring stuff and I really can not be bothered to explain. But i will say this... if you are not familiar with base 2, base 7 or base 16 then dont even bother to try and grasp the concept of this as it will just confuse you. People in the early days had to use their brains in order to make a calculator work and so an early computer - now days they just use computers to do the work, so may people now dont know how they work, cos the computer sorts it for them.... Now, if you are still hungry for information got to the library as mentioned earlier (people in the olden days wrote books about this stuff)

[b]Its all to do with 0's and 1's.... Its really boring stuff and I really can not be bothered to explain. But i will say this... if you are not familiar with base 2, base 7 or base 16 then dont even bother to try and grasp the concept of this as it will just confuse you.

LOL, someone sounds confused...

Care to tell a retired software engineer, security consultant and firmware designer where base 7 fits in? Or even base 10? ... in fact, even base 16? They are all just ways of expressing numbers. Computers work on base2 in various sized chunks. I've yet to see an application of Base7 in computing hardware... thats 2.666(recurring) bits. You care to give an example?

To the original poster...

Essentially your monitor has a tiny beam that sweeps horizontaly across the screen illuminating tiny dots of Red Green and Blue (which combined in different brightnesses produce any colour your computer is capable of displaying) ... It scans from left to the right making one line of the picture... then it quickly returns to the left hand side and starts again. (Incidentally, the time it takes to do this is called the Horizontal Refresh Rate)

Meanwhile, it is also scanning down the screen from top to bottom. So, you can imagine it placing the picture on the screen in much the same way as you may fill up a pad of paper by writing on it. The difference is that the monitor does it so fast your eyes don't see the beam - just a complete picture. This is thanks to a feature of human perception known as 'persistence of vision'... anyway, we call the time it takes to scan down the screen the 'vertical refresh rate'

Once a full screen is drawn the beam finds itself in the lower right hand corner... It returns directly to the top left in a straight line without illuminating any pixels (We call this a retrace and it is incredibly fast) - and then it begins all over again. This makes the picture appear continuous.

Now, in your graphic card is a piece of memory called the 'Output Frame Buffer' - It is arranged like graph paper and holds all of the red, green and blue values for each point on the screen. As the monitors beam moves down the page the graphic card follows along in memory... it feeds the red, green and blue intensities to the monitor as the beam progresses so that the appropriate colour appears at point on the screen. If RG and B are all lit then the result is white ... if none are lit then the result is black... and by lighting them if varying ratios we can make anything from purple to orange to cyan - kinda like mixing paint.

How does the picture get into the framebuffer of the graphic card in the first place? Well, thats where things get complicated. Each graphic card has a slightly different way of describing things and therefore each card has its own 'video driver' which is essentially a translator... we don't need to know how it works, only that it does.

The operating system has the job of talking to the driver. The operating system has a group of tools that programs can use - it's called the API or 'Application Programming Interface'. A special group of these (In windows we call it the GDI) are responsible for drawing things to the screen. When an application wants to draw a line it uses these tools. The operating system keeps a picture (similar to the framebuffer but called a 'device context') for each application. It uses this to make a larger picture (the desktops 'device context') which is built from all of the others ... it passes this to the driver which translates it to the graphic card in a way the graphic card can understand.

Whilst the graphic card is busy drawing its output framebuffer to the monitor it is also building the next framebuffer based on the operating systems instructions passed via the driver. When the first framebuffer has finished drawing the process starts again with the graphic cards new framebuffer.

There are other tools applications can use which talk directly to the driver... some of these have been engineered for speed and have complex maths for helping us to make 3D scenes and lighting effects such as those we find in games... The two main ones are OpenGL and DirectX.

The beauty of the system is that we don't need to know how it works... if we had to know how everything worked just to get a pixel drawn well... nobody would bother. Imagine having to know everything about engines, fluid dynamics, laws of momentum/friction/kinetics and chemistry in order to drive a car. We call this 'abstraction' ... the complex inner workings are hidden from us behind an interface which is intuitive. If we want a line we simple tell the API what colour and where, and it works out everything else for us - and if we want a car to go faster we push the accellerator. Ain't abstraction great?

If you have any specific questions then feel free to contact me (garychapman-at-telefonica-dot-net) and I'll give you some real examples of what is going on behind the scenes... but don't expect to understand all of it, and don't expect to ever need to. As has been said it would take at LEAST a few years of intense study to get an appreciation of how all the layers fit together.

I hope what I have given you, although very much simplified, is enough to satisfy your curiosity for now. If you do find this stuff interesting then perhaps you should take a programming course and then start reading the microsoft windows SDK which describes the API in detail. If the hardware aspect is more your thing then I'd suggest a course in digital electronics followed by experimenting with microcontrollers and LCD's - then trying to relate your new found knowledge to the 'PCI specification' and books on IA32 architecture. To see how the two fit together you could try reading microsofts DDK documentation (Although thats quite a way off for now - get some basics down first : )